Recommended by Conor McShane

Rather than a stodgy, straightforward recounting, Billy to His Friends is a wonderfully alive, vibrant, theatrical piece of storytelling. I wasn't familiar with Billy Sipple's story before reading this, but I feel I learned more about him and the unwitting sacrifice he made than I would have reading any book or newspaper article.

A delightful, freewheeling, irreverent take on a local Chicago legend, and a loving tribute to the hucksters, swindlers, and tale-spinners that made our fair city what it is today.

An empathic portrait of a family struggling with grief, and the ways that our expectations in life don't often line up with reality. The characters all clearly want to be okay with one another, but struggle to see through their own pain enough to do so. A subtly and sensitively rendered story.

From the AIDS crisis in the 80s to the Flint Water Crisis of today, our government has a history of laws and practices that cause harm to marginalized communities, whether through neglect or calculated intention. This play shines a light on another example of the powers that be imposing their own morality on the people, regardless of who is hurt in the process. That it does so while also telling a crackling mystery story with engaging characters makes it an incredible feat of playwriting. Highly recommended.

A delightfully surreal look at relationships and what we give to one another.

A heartbreaking piece that deftly illustrates the personal, human toll of an often-overlooked chapter in our country's history, not giving us a neat conclusion but inviting us to sit with the injustice of it.

This play does a great job pulling the reader along towards its strange conclusion, never over-explaining its premise and allowing the subtext to carry through. A tense exploration of duality and our propensity for violence.

Using an epidemic of a different era, this lovely, melancholy play speaks to our current moment and the value of art to make sense of our shared pain, to give meaning to what we're living through, and to give us the space to grieve together.

This play was written a while before the start of the plague we're currently living through, but nevertheless captures the absurdity of our current situation, and what it's like to try to make art during a pandemic, in a very funny, absurd way.

A stunning meditation on death, memory, and how much (or how little) we can ever really know about each other. The way that Vanderark physicalizes the shifting and fading of memories is fascinating, and the theatrical space it conjures is so vivid and compelling, I'd absolutely love to see a theatre company tackle this piece!